Subhankar Banerjee's photograph, Caribou migration, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 2002, was used to illustrate Tim Flannery's article in the New York Review of Books.

It is often argued that cap and trade legislation requires too many compromises with--and give-aways to--polluting corporations to pass the House and Senate, and that consequently it is ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While environmentalists are failing to support cap and trade, those opposing action on climate change are fiercely attacking it. Yet such a system is essential when it comes to getting global action on climate change--not least at the increasingly imperilled climate summit in Copenhagen in December--for it delivers a transparent benchmark by which nations can judge each other's commitment.

Using technology recently developed for electronic textiles, researchers at MIT have developed a fabric camera made from polymer fibers. The potential applications are difficult to predict -- the advance of these type of high-tech fiber technologies will radically transform the integration of new technologies into our everyday lives, making processes like monitoring vital signs, air quality and even collecting visual information an invisible function of the clothes we wear.

integrate eight semiconducting light sensors into a polymer cylinder with a diameter of 25 millimeters. controlling the sensor's spacing and angle within the fiber. Once the sensors, made of a type of semiconducting glass, were in position, the polymer cylinder was heated and then stretched so that the diameter shrank the diameter of hundreds of micrometers--a process that is identical to the way in which commercial fiber is made for telecommunication applications--retaining the orientation of the sensors.

Former Santa Fe resident and PDN Photo Editor Amber Terranova gives her wrap up of Review Santa Fe and and interview with one of Center's 100 Jason Florio.

I've just returned from sunny Santa Fe after an exciting weekend of reviewing portfolios and meeting with photographers from all over the world.Photo-Eye kicked off the event on Thursday night by setting up a delicious New Mexican buffet dinner for all of the photographers, reviewers and people in the Santa Fe community. The outdoor area was packed with photographers and reviewers mingling, while others perused the bookstore and Debbie Fleming Caffery's striking new exhibition(that opened the same night in the gallery).

While in the bookstore I asked some folks to share with us their favorite book of the moment. Here's what some said:

On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva, on assignment in Alabama, learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. They raced to the scene and there, incredibly, had unfettered access to the hotel grounds, Dr. King's room, and the surrounding area. For reasons that have been lost in the intervening years, the photographs taken that night and the next day were never published. Until now.

An Army archivist is undertaking a massive project to digitize and make public a unique collection of rare and sometimes startling military medical images, from the Civil War to Vietnam.

This previously unreported archive at the Army-run National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., contains 500,000 scans of unique images so far, with another 225,000 set to be digitized this year.

Mike Rhode, the museum's head archivist, is working to make tens of thousands of those images, which have been buried in the museum's archive, available on Flickr. Working after hours, his team has posted a curated selection of almost 800 photos on the service already.

Since Joerg Colberg is very much the lover of photographs of the human figure, the conversation between him and photographer Steve Pyke primarily focuses on his Pyke's portraits.

The human face signals our emotions, suggests our cultural background. It is the naked part, that we present to the world; our faces speak realms about our identity. Our faces anchor us to our histories, our stories and the stories of our ancestors. Our faces change with time, our faces absorb the passage of time. We tell our stories through our faces: how we present ourselves, how we use this personal canvas to convey not only our emotions, but also histories and identities.-- Steve Pyke

Pyke goes on to discuss photographing the homeless in the 1980s in Britian, French philosopher Helen Cixous and General Pinochet. Read the entire conversation at Conscientious.

cigarettesandpurity.com linked last week to an article about the how experts-- for example, museum prepators and taxidermists-- often mess up quadrupedal gait:

They [a team of biological physicists] randomly gathered a representative sampling of 307 depictions of quadrupeds walking in museum exhibits, taxidermy catalogues, animal-anatomy books and toys. The result?

Museums screwed things up a stunning 41% of the time. Taxidermy catalogues got it wrong 43% of the time, toys 50% of the time, and animal-anatomy catalogues were the worst, with 63.6% errors.

The article sites how the Eadweard Muybridge studies and the simple observation of your neighborhood mongrel can help prevent these professionals from making such a mistake.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates removed the ban on pictures of coffins of returning war dead. The article at CNN.com includes video of the announcement to the press and the video of the news conference where President George H.W. Bush is simultaneously broadcast with an inset footage of the first casualties being brought home from Panama. Unbeknownst to the first President Bush at that time, his light attitude while these images were displayed side by side was not taken well. This broadcast is thought to have lead to the government ban two years later in 1991 on photographs during the first Gulf War. Now the ban has been lifted provided the living family gives consent.

The ban amounted to government censorship of the media and denial of vital public information to the American public. It is the public's right and responsibility to see these images and learn about the consequences of military actions. These images, if done respectfully, only add to documenting the honor of the soldiers and their ultimate sacrifice. The photographs also ensure that there is transparency in government and visual information available on casualties from war to inform future generations.

U2's new album, No Line on the Horizon will be released in the US tomorrow. For the cover of this new release, they've elected to use a minimal design over Hiroshi Sugimoto's photograph Boden Sea. Ryan Dombal at pitchforkmedia.com points out that they are not the first band to release an album using this particular Sugimoto photograph.

Copyright Hiroshi Sugimoto, Boden Sea

In 2006, the sound artists Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree were invited by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to musically reinterpret the works in Sugimoto's Seascapes series. The result of their efforts premiered on March 30, 2006 in front of the curved panoramic window of the Museum's Lerner Room as the sun set across the city's skyline. The live recording was subsequently released as the album Specifications.Fifteen with Boden Sea. Odd that the very same image, out of the many Sugimoto has in the series, was selected again.

Find more at Pitchfork Media, including a link to Taylor Dupree's blog which has gotten a slew of comments from some rather avid U2 devotees.

JS: How do you think the process differs today from when you were establishing yourself in the 60's and 70's?
JM: Back in my day it was like laying bricks. Slow and steady and labor intensive. Probably today it's similar for those who believe in themselves and the medium, in that it always takes a deep personal commitment to the mystery and craft of this special system we love. But what is different today is the means at your disposal for transmitting the work that you do. In my time it was a one-on-one means of showing/sharing work and it had to be done in person so the person you showed it to could clearly see that you were a young, wet behind the ears, photographer. Now you can shoot a "slide" show to people across the globe and they don't know who you are and only have the work to deal with. But that's really a plus for all of you.